The Key My Husband Forgot I Had

“Paula,” he said, “I need to ask you one thing.”

“Go ahead.”

“Is there a nail somewhere in here I can hang this on? It don’t belong on a counter.”

I had to turn around and look at the stove for a second.

“Hank, you can’t be over here. You’ve got forty-four years in that store.”

“I know how many I got.”

“He’ll cut your pay. He might let you go.”

“He can’t.” Hank came in and set the toolbox down on my counter with a thump that raised the dust. “I quit at seven this morning. Wrote it on the back of a receipt and left it with the girl. She said she’d give it to him when he comes in.”

“Hank.”

“I found that apron at 6:20. Found the key on top of it.” He reached in his shirt pocket and laid the brass key on the plank between us. “Stood there and looked at it till the coffee went cold. I been opening that store with you since you was twenty-five years old. I ain’t never opened it for him. Not one morning.”

“I didn’t leave that for you to follow me. I want you to know that. I left it because it was finished.”

“I know why you left it.” He opened the toolbox. Inside were his screen roller, his files, his pipe threader, a tape measure worn to bare steel. “Mrs. Albright’s got a storm door needs rescreening. I told her to bring it here at eleven. That all right?”

I picked up the key. I held it out to him.

“That goes back across the street. It’s not mine anymore. It’s sure not yours.”

He nodded. He walked it back himself on his lunch break and handed it to Tiffany at the register, and told her to tell Wayne it was the last one.

Then he came back and rescreened Mrs. Albright’s storm door on my card table, and she paid me eighteen dollars in cash, and that was the first sale.

I drove a nail into the wall behind the counter with the heel of my shoe and hung up the apron. Then I took it back down and put it on.

Bev came Wednesday.

Bev has kept the books at Crandall’s for thirty-one years. She is sixty-three, she wears her glasses on a beaded chain, and she has never in her life been late on a quarterly filing. I looked up from a mower blade at half past nine and there she was, holding a potted fern and an adding machine.

“Before you say anything,” she said, “I did not take a single sheet of paper out of that office. Not a ledger, not a sticky note. I want that understood.”

“I’d never have thought it.”

“Well, he will.” She set the fern on the windowsill and the adding machine on the counter. “I sat in that courtroom Monday, Paula. In the back. I heard that man in the gray suit tell the judge the store has lost money three years running.”

“Bev, you can’t talk about that.”

“I’m not talking about it. I’m just saying what I heard, same as everybody else in the room.” She took off her glasses and cleaned them on her blouse. “A store that loses money three years running cannot afford a full-time bookkeeper. I told Wayne so this morning. I told him I was saving him the expense.”

“What did he say?”